Truly Exotic is an original one act play written by me, Frank I. Swannack. The play is mainly set in the Elizabethan period, but features anachronistic conceits. It challenges preconceived notions of what it means to be civilised when confronted with difference. The following synopsis describes Truly Exotic in more detail:

Set in the twenty-first and sixteenth-century London, Truly Exotic blurs the differences between the civilised English and foreign savage. It begins with a merchant masquerade, a physician of time and space, who has a business plan connecting two different time periods. He transports a twenty-first century prostitute to the sixteenth-century as a wench for her ability to please men from all cultures. For, in the sixteenth-century, a courtier has unsuccessfully led an English army against the Irish rebels. He has returned from Ireland too early and now needs to placate Queen Elizabeth I. In a London tavern, the courtier learns from the wench about a lost map charting an island rich in gold. It is a prize he knows would please the queen and even make him king. With the intention of attending business matters at the River Thames, the courtier meets the merchant masquerade selling exotica from the New World. After the merchant has advertised his wares, the two men exchange tales of exploits in foreign lands. From the merchant, the courtier learns about Anthroposia: a mysterious island bountiful in gold that bears a striking similarity to the wench’s lost map. He realises the merchant holds the key to truly pleasing the queen, but can the courtier afford the price?

Truly Exotic is being performed at the 2016 Page to Stage Liverpool Festival, more details and ticket purchases are from this link. Book now to avoid disappointment.

Furthermore, the festival is hosting a double bill with another play influenced by the early modern period, The Chamber of Beheaded Queens (click on title for more details). Tickets available from Eventbrite.

Truly Exotic has its own Facebook Page. Check out the play’s official trailer here.

Whilst reviewing Mathew Lyons’ excellent The Favourite: Ambition, Politics and Love – Sir Walter Ralegh in Elizabeth I’s Court, I remembered a poem I wrote a few years ago about Ralegh. I reread the poem and thought it good enough to publish on Hobbinol’s Blog. The poem reflects on Ralegh’s ‘achievements’ as explorer, coloniser and entrepreneur as he -Continue reading>

Othello’s toleration or, more accurately, his masochistic acceptance of his barbaric past that is a surplus requirement of his European identity, is demonstrated in his ‘travailous history’ (1.3, line 140) that captivates Desdemona:

Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle
Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven
It was my hint to speak – such was my process –
And of the cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders… (1.3, lines 141-146)

Othello describes a non-European space characterised by its vast caves and empty deserts. The implied gigantic scale of uncultivated land is confirmed by the alliteration in ‘Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch/heaven’. The pathetic fallacy of the ‘hills whose heads touch/heaven’ indicates exotic phallic excess that threatens to exceed its boundaries. The border created between the -Continue Reading>

Early Modern Exchanges
The official blog of Early Modern Exchanges that studies the diverse cultural, historical, economic and social exchanges between England and Europe, European countries, the Old World and the New in the period 1450-1800.